China Smartphones: Hot for Sensor Hubs

In this approach, a low-power motion platform combines high-performance accelerometer and MCU technology to simplify sensor fusion. "This is typically a more limited solution in terms of features, but has some power and integration simplicity advantages," the Hillcrest spokeswoman said.

Other sensor hub competitors include Freescale Semiconductor, which launched the Xtrinsic fusion platform in 2012. Designed to exceed basic three-axis market requirements, the Xtrinsic integrates an onboard accelerometer with the ability to manage multiple external sensors.

When the Xtrinsic was launched, Freescale said it provides an ideal platform for making smarter system-level decisions by enabling complex calculations required for sensor fusion algorithms via interpreted sensing information and control, rather than simple raw data processing.

China market
Hillcrest's design wins with China's Coolpad and Oppo are significant, considering the strengths of both brands in that country.

Cell phones are no more only cell phones now, due to Androids and IOS, there are many varied applications are making use of various sensors on the cellular devices. Many important applications are also there that are dealing with medical electronics and measurement. A common sensor interface (I mean hub here), will surely provide better handling of these sensors including the possibilities of standard calibrations. I frequently use Audio Analyser applications, but these applications give different results on different devices due to lack of common standard calibration capabilities.

I have been very impressed with the advances made in very capable low-power SoC's due to the cell phone industry, but it looks like I have only been paying attention to half of the story. One platform that I have been working does sensor fusion the old fashioned way with discrete sensors and fusion performed in the main CPU. This creates resource contention and, from the sound of it, uses more power than a sensor hub approach. Is this approach used in current cell phone designs, or is it something that is coming down the road?